Personally, the only time I remember caving to peer pressure had some pretty negative results. I started smoking. What about you? Do you do what your heart tells you, or do you move with the herd? Do you have a pricey smart phone with dozens of features you don’t use or understand? Are you tethered to a mortgage, maybe even underwater with it? Do you have home gym equipment that spends more time as a Laundry Storage Unit? Those things are all peer pressure at work. Maybe you even have a job you hate, because peer pressure drove you to strive to seek a certain income level so you didn’t feel inferior around your friends. But listening to your peers not only won’t make you happy as a “regular person”, it will probably prevent you from reaching the stratospheric heights of those we admire.
Imagine if Martin Luther King Jr., Gandhi, or Jesus had tried to fit in with their peers. And in business, examples of those who bucked conventional wisdom and reached epic heights as a result abound. Craigslist founder Jim Buckmaster survived the dotcom busts with what he now calls “the ironies of unbranding, demonetizing, and noncompeting”. Chris Albrecht basically used the company’s slogan “It’s not TV. It’s HBO.” to create one of the most successful TV networks ever. Sir Richard Branson, who has made billions with record companies, media stores, an airline, and a mobile carrier, started out by signing music acts no-one else would – like the Sex Pistols – and even today, he’s building space planes while many other executives are staring at their ledgers in fear and gutting their companies of value and humanity to protect profit.
By the way, this would fly in the face of the values of one of the greatest trailblazers of all time, Henry Ford. As disturbing as it may sound to some conservative modern ears, the Ford Motor Company not only relied on Ford’s technical innovations, but the insane ideas he had about how to treat the workforce better, with a concept called “welfare capitalism”. Shorter work days, better wages, and actual concern for the humans who worked for him helped an entire society transform itself into a vehicle for personal freedom and expression. So the next time your friends tell you your idea is crazy, maybe that’s how you’ll know you should pursue it. And if you feel like you don’t fit in, revel in it. Leave the wisdom of the crowd to the lemmings.
